Search the joint

Pages

Music video: Namie Amuro - Hero

Namie was approached to deliver a theme for the national broadcasts of the Rio 2016 Olympics. But given the lyrics, this could also be Namie making a stake to be The queen of the Japanese LGBT community. The queen of the Japanese disability community. The queen of the Japanese homeless. She just be reaching out to everybody. If only Namie had featured a black person in the garden, a gay couple dancing in the water and a person in the wheelchair carrying the Olympic torch, she would have been the one.

The music video to the song has a really nice theme and Namie looks every bit the Aphrodite here. But the CGI is horrific. The garden scenes were the only scenes which looked good and were of high fidelity. Everything other scene looked like it was pulling those tricks that video games pull when they want to mask hardware shortcomings. Lens flares, filters, blurring, overuse of particles. They really tried it. The water and fire scenes looked a mess.

The song feels as though 3 versions of it were produced and then pieced together. I like each version / section individually, but they don't hold together well because the distinction between them feels too obvious and segmented. There also should have been a key change at the end.

I would not be pressed in any way if Namie left this song off of her next studio album. But it's better than Katy Perry's "Rise" though.